Today I’m wondering what Republicans – and other self-described conservatives – would think of this story.

A man arrives at the emergency room of the local hospital with blood pouring from a severed artery in his leg. The doctors quickly set up a transfusion to replace the blood. But he tells them not to close the wound.

Now, obviously the patient is going to die because the hospital will run out of blood. Or, depending on the guy’s insurance, he’ll run out of coverage. Either way, under this treatment scenario, his next stop will be the cemetery.

OK, so why am I asking conservatives about this?

Because that’s the treatment plan they’ve settled on to confront the mortal wounds being inflicted on their communities by global warming. They have begun seeking billions in tax dollars for temporary treatments to “adapt” to warming’s very real symptoms, which they already are experiencing. These include rising tides causing city flooding; greater destruction from more frequent and larger tropical storms; catastrophic flooding from record rains; fractured infrastructure; failing water supplies; drought, and more frequent and intense fires.

But they don’t want to take steps to reduce or eliminate the cause of their suffering: global warming resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases.

I’ve been watching the growth of this suicidal approach to the crisis through my Google alert for sea level rise, which daily sends news stories on that topic to my email account. And almost every day there are one or more stories about cities or states in the GOP column seeking grants from the federal government to “adapt” to problems already being caused by climate change, or others they see rushing toward them. They might want levees, floodwalls, elevated roads, rebuilt beaches, or the planning studies for guidance on what to do as the temperature and the water continue to rise.

But even as they now admit global warming is happening, they continue to elect congressional delegations who oppose any regulations that would reduce the emissions that are driving warming. They think it makes sense for a nation that has already lost $350 billion in the last decade to extreme weather events and fires linked to global warming to spend hundreds of millions more to “adapt” to these threats – without doing anything to prevent the disasters from happening again.

In other words, surrender, don’t fight back.

And that’s conservative?

Now, admittedly, I came of age in a different millennium, but at that time a conservative was someone who believed in a careful, studied and prudent approach to all problems. Back then – that time when our president claims America was still great – a conservative was someone who embraced, among other things, the politics of personal and fiscal responsibility and abhorred wasting tax dollars. That’s how the demand for cost-benefit reasoning in government spending developed. So imagine telling someone like Barry Goldwater that you wanted money to address the impact of a burning fire, but you didn’t want to put the fire out.

Yet that’s the position today’s GOP has staked out when it comes to warming. In fact, this has become the banner under which GOPers now claim to be all on board with a response to climate change. Not “stop” or even “reduce.” Just “adapt.”

Meanwhile President Donald Trump continues to push one of his highest legislative priorities: dismantling not just the climate regulations established by his predecessors, but even the research programs that study it.

And GOP delegations from some the states most threatened by climate change – including Louisiana’s – continue to march in lock step with this oxymoronic policy: Seek billions in federal help to “adapt” to the problems without trying to solve them.

Which brings us back to the guy with the severed artery who refused to have the wound closed.

He told the doctors that blood transfusions were his way to “adapt” to the mortal wound.

I wonder how that will end?

Bob Marshall, former Outdoors editor for The Times-Picayune and former environmental reporter for The Lens, writes a regular column. He can be reached at bmarshallenviro@gmail.com.